A luminaire (light fixture) is a device comprising at least one lamp for emitting illumination, and any associated socket, support and/or housing. A luminaire may take any of a variety of forms, such as a conventional ceiling or wall mounted luminaire, free standing luminaire or wall washer, or a less conventional form such as an illumination source built into a surface or an item of furniture, or any other type of lighting device for emitting illumination into an environment. The lamp refers to an individual light-emitting component within a luminaire, of which there may be one or more per luminaire. The lamp may also take any of a number of forms, such as an LED-based lamp, a gas-discharge lamp, or a filament bulb. An increasingly popular form of lamp is a retrofittable LED-based lamp comprising one or more LEDs as the means by which to emit illumination, but being made retrofittable into a luminaire designed for a traditional filament bulb or fluorescent tube.
A luminaire or even an individual lamp may also be equipped with a wireless communication interface allowing the luminaire or lamp to be controlled remotely by lighting control commands received from a user device such as a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer, or wireless wall-switch; and/or based on sensor readings received from one or more remote sensors. Nowadays, the communication interface can be included directly within the lamp itself (e.g. in the end-cap of a retrofittable replacement for a filament bulb or fluorescent tube). For example this can allow a user, through the user device, to turn the lamp's illumination on and off, to dim the illumination level up or down, to change the colour of the emitted illumination, and/or to create a dynamic (time varying) lighting effect. In one form, the communication interface is configured to receive the lighting control commands and/or to share sensor data via a local, short-range radio access technology such as Wi-Fi, 802.15.4, ZigBee or Bluetooth. Such lamps may sometimes be referred to as “connected” lamps.
One type of connected lamp is an instant-fit “tube LED” (TLED) lamp which retrofits into a luminaire designed for traditional fluorescent tubes. According to the instant-fit TLED approach, the existing fixed-output fluorescent ballast, the TLED lamp-holders and also all the electrical wiring within the luminaire remain unchanged. Via straightforward re-lamping, existing “dumb” fluorescent tubes (or even “dumb” TLED tubes) can be exchanged with dimmable connected TLEDs each having an individual, integrated wireless radio.
While LED-based lamps tend to have a longer lifetime than filament bulbs and florescent tubes, nonetheless, for any type of lamp there will be required a process for replacing a lamp in a luminaire when that lamp eventually wears out or breaks, or it is desired to upgrade the lamp with a new model, or such like. For a wirelessly network enabled lamp, this involves not only physically removing the old lamp from the socket of the luminaire and replacing with the new lamp, but also ensuring the new lamp is connected to the network in a manner that enables it to act as a replacement for the old lamp in terms of its wireless functionality, e.g. to enable it to be controlled in the same way from a remote control unit or app.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,982,754 discloses a system which detects when a node is missing from a mesh network, and joins a new node to the network to replace the missing node. However, it does not deal with the issue of replacement lamps or other components in luminaires.